Africa's heart nurtures one man's reality check

Meeting refugee children in Africa made John Jennings "conscious of inequity".
Picture: Paul Harris

John Jennings is a suburban man. He lives not far from where he grew up; his sons attended his old school. For more than 30 years, he worked for the revenue section of the Customs Service. His life revolved around his family, his church and watching his son play football for De La Salle Old Boys. In 1994, he retired. "I was," he says, "a public sector, eastern suburban, conservative Catholic."

Four years after he retired, he received a phone call from an international agency asking if he would like to work as a consultant in customs revenue. "It seemed an interesting opportunity."

In Zambia at the age of 60, he experienced for the first time what it is to be in a white minority. He worked in Fiji, Samoa and Vanuatu. The worst poverty he saw was on the Pacific island of Kiribati. There, for the first time, he sensed a general air of hopelessness.

In May of this year he went to Uganda. An acquaintance of his wife's, a Sister of Mercy called Cathy Solano, was working in that country. When he reached Kampala, he made inquiries and learned she was in a refugee camp called Adjumani in the far north where Uganda borders the Congo and Sudan. He contacted Solano who invited him to visit. When he asked what she needed, she said fresh green vegetables. With a fellow worker, he decided to take them to her.

It was his first journey into the African interior. Coming in for their first landing in an old twin-engined 18-seater, he saw a dirt strip and a pole with an air sock on it. A nearby wooden shed was the airport lounge. The next leg of the journey was flown at an altitude of a few hundred metres. He saw the vast brownness of the land and the innumerable walking tracks. "In Africa," he says, "most people walk."

When they reached Adjumani, Cathy Solano picked them up and took them to one of the town's 57 nursery schools - a thatched hut without walls with 200 kids in it. Jennings found 200 pairs of eyes looking at him in wonderment. "Who were these big, white - and therefore rich - people?"

He saw 100 women standing in line, each waiting to fill her jerry can before walking the five or 10 kilometres to her dwelling.

Adjumani has a population of 150,000, of whom 30,000 - many of them orphans - are students. Jennings says, thanks to the Jesuit Refugee Service, that the kids at the nursery school were relatively well dressed and in sure receipt of one meal a day - 85 grams of a porridge made from soya beans and maize. Child after child came up and stroked his hand. In his deeply understated way, he says, "I was conscious of inequity".

Next morning, he saw 100 women standing in line at a pump, each waiting to fill her jerry can before walking the five or 10 kilometres back to her dwelling with the can on her head. "We turn on the tap," he says simply. "For me, that was the moment of absolute contrast."

Adjumani is on the edge of rebel territory. Jennings says the rebels have attacked the schools and abducted orphans - the boys to serve as soldiers, the girls as prostitutes. The Sudanese rebels are said to be funded by the Ugandan Government, the Ugandan rebels are allegedly funded by the Sudanese Government. Rebel groups from the Congo are also in the area.

Walking through the town on the second day, they were passed by a truckload of men in jungle greens hooting and yelling. His companion, who fought in the Vietnam War, told Jennings to put his camera down. Later that day they attended a function for a black priest leaving for the Congo. Jennings' companion, not a religious man, said he didn't think the priest looked too happy to be going. His predecessor had been shot.

But Jennings also noticed that in Adjumani, unlike Kampala, there were no beggars. He observed the ingenuity displayed by the local people, a man sitting over a fire of hot coals welding the broken frame of his bicycle back together. He also saw how important education was to the place. "What they hope for is that one day they'll have a better lifestyle. Secondary education gives them that chance." Unlike Kiribati, the spirit of Adjumani was not one of hopelessness.

Jennings credits two Australian Sisters of Mercy, Cathy Solano (from Fawkner, in Melbourne) and Anne Kelly (originally from Adelaide), with helping maintain the morale of the refugee population by managing the local education program. "Here were these two Aussie girls in this godforsaken place doing real work to help people. I think they're heroes." Kelly spent the weekend Jennings was in Adjumani nursing a Dutch colleague who was delusional with malaria.

John Jennings is a quiet, reserved man. His eldest son Bill, a teacher, knew something had happened to his father in Uganda when he got home. "He had something he wanted to say." John Jennings says what happened to him in Adjumani was a reality check. His view of the world has changed. Back in Australia, he sees people who don't know how lucky they are.

Footnote: The story on Australian Gandhian Mary Jean Hunter, published on August 11, stated that when she joined Community Aid Abroad in the late 1960s, the organisation was run "by a then more conservative Anglican Church". The article did not make it clear that this was Hunter's opinion, not an agreed statement of fact.